Never Been Kissed in Michigan: Part 3!

Share!

thenameselodie is one of the funniest people on the planet, and she still can't get a kiss. WHAT GIVES?—Sparkitors

I spent the entirety of my holiday break playing Mario Kart in the basement, so the potential for smooching was pretty much zero. In lieu of any actual developments, let me tell you about the closest I’ve ever gotten to being kissed:

A family party is not the ideal place to get a first kiss. It is the ideal place to watch your drunken uncles duel with foam swords, but first kisses are pretty scarce. All the eligible males are either a) way too old, or b) related to you. There was only one boy attending this particular party who wasn't thusly disqualified: Tristan.

Understand, Sparklers, that Tristan and I go way back—to summers when we were ten years old and awkwardly built and we didn’t care. We played pick-up baseball on the beach. We made sandcastles. We went swimming and jumped over the Lake Michigan waves. But we hadn’t seen each other since then; he was my cousin’s best friend, and they lived a few hours away, so our paths didn’t exactly cross very often. The last time we saw each other, we were just kids making sandwiches out of Fruit Roll-Ups and Twinkies. (We were weird.) Suddenly we found ourselves at a party—a family party, but a party nonetheless—and we were teenagers. I was a girl and he was a boy. That hadn’t mattered before, and suddenly it did.

We exchanged that obligatory hey-haven’t-seen-you-in-years greeting. My brother Alex was much less sentimental and simply favored him with a Nerf ball to the head and a nod of recognition. Within minutes, a vicious game of Twister was underway. Tristan played with my brother and cousins (all boys) while I spun the spinner.

“Don’t call left foot green!” he begged.

“Left foot green,” I said.

“You didn’t even spin it!”

I smiled. “Do you remember holding my head underwater at the beach when we were ten?”

“I can’t believe you remember that,” he said, twisting himself into a pretzel in order to get his left foot around my brother. “You’re still holding that against me? That’s spiteful.”

It was all very fun and casual. Until Tristan and I snuck away to play cards in one of the guest bedrooms under the guise of “getting away from all the screaming kids.” And then… and then? Then things got interesting.

We played a few card games, and there was some wayward flirting going on. Having never had much experience with that kind of thing, I panicked. What was the next step here? This scenario had “first kiss” written all over it. Was I supposed to initiate it? Should I throw him a “come-hither” look? I didn’t even know how to go about that! I’d read in Seventeen Magazine that when a girl touches her mouth, it means she’s interested. What was this, a secret spy mission? Should I use smoke signals too? I was still considering all of this when he leaned in—whether to absolve me of my lip virginity or to shuffle the deck, we may never know—and I jumped to my feet. I had no idea where I was going with this. He looked at me quizzically. “Are we done playing?”

Oh, God. What was he implying? “No,” I said with a slightly hysterical laugh, and to excuse my sudden spastic standing maneuver I crossed the room to the slightly open door and shut it completely. Oh my God, I thought, did I really just do that? Talk about a signal! He glanced at the door when I returned, then leaned forward and said, “We—”

I can’t remember the dates of the Seven Years’ War or who fought whom. I can’t remember what constitutes a binomial setting. But I remember Tristan leaning forward and saying “We—” like it was yesterday, and I wonder, We WHAT? I never did find out, because at that very second my dear brother Alex burst in and bellowed “THERE IS A RACCOON ATTACKING A BIRD IN THE GARAGE!”

Coupled with the fact that Alex was gesturing emphatically for us to follow him, it was hard to think of kissing somebody when there was a raccoon/bird skirmish happening right upstairs. Those two ideas just didn’t coincide. So Tristan did this cute little “after you” movement, and we all thundered up the stairs to watch said skirmish. (If you’re dying to know, my uncle chased both animals away with his foam sword.)

Having rejoined the party, Tristan and I were roped into family games for the rest of the night. Neither of us mentioned our close encounter, but when I left with my family, he gave me a little wink from across the room.

And there you have it, Sparklers. The kiss that never was. It’s the only spike of feeble activity on the EKG that is my love life. But don’t worry—this year, I’ve resolved to change that.